(Presented at the International Seminar, REVIEW AND PROSPECT FOR WORLD HISTORY AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, held August 11-15, 1996, in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, People’s Republic of China, by the Chinese Contemporary World History Research Society.)

AN APPEAL FOR RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP ON AFRICA THAT CORRECTS EUROPE’S LIES, DISTORTIONS AND OMISSIONS

INTRODUCTION

    W. E. B. Du Bois, the eminent, African-American scholar/activist, wrote at the beginning of the 20th Century in 1903:  "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line - - the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea."  What made the color line "the problem of the 20th Century" for  Du Bois was its use by powerful forces in Europe and in North America to discredit and to undermine the democratic ideal: that the collective will of the people, all the people,  freely arrived at and freely expressed, will produce the greatest good. A belief Du Bois held to throughout his long life.

    The exclusion by Europe of Black peoples,  i.e. the peoples of Black Africa, from “all the people” of “the democratic ideal”,  in an attempt to justify the African slave trade and the institution of slavery, reinforced the basis for dividing the human family into those destined to rule and those destined to be ruled.  This exclusion coincided with and assisted the rise of capitalism,  colonialism’s expansion and the era of European, imperial hegemony.  By the beginning of the 20th Century it was clear to Du Bois that European research and scholarship on Africa and the African, in the service of the African slave trade, colonialism and imperialism, misrepresented truth, distorted reality and ignored black Africa’s’ antiquity.

    This research and scholarship continues to dominate academe today.  As a result it is the basis for general education and popular media and cultural representations of Africa and Africans, not only in Europe and North America, but globally!   Consequently, a major task of researchers and scholars of 20th Century world history is to correct the misrepresentations and distortions of European scholarship on Africa and its interaction with the rest of the world.  And to supply the missing truth of Africa’s antiquity, particularly Africa south of the Sahara,  prior to the African slave trade and colonialism’s devastation  of the African continent.

THE SLAVE TRADE

    Those who engaged in and supported the European slave trade well into the modern era were required to provide a justification  to counter the inevitable, humanist, anti-slavery sentiment emanating from the ideals and beliefs that accompanied the European Enlightenment. Despite evidence to the contrary, attested to by reports of early travelers and adventurers to the African continent and by surviving, pre-Colonial records, archaeological and architectural antiquities,  the image of the uncivilized and uncivilizable African savage was invented and widely propagated throughout Europe with the beginning of the African slave trade to justify that trade and the subsequent colonialization of Africa.

    In order to succeed, however, some unchanging and unchangeable trait or mark was required to explain what made Africans fit only to be slaves. The only thing that truly distinguished the African from the European was color. In all other respects there was no difference readily apparent.   And thus a black skin became synonymous with inferior, savage, uncivilized.  In 1920 Dr. Du Bois wrote:  "Ever have men striven to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different, in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage.  It has been left, however, to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal, world-wide work of meanness -- color !      

    Du Bois understood that associating color and ethnicity with inferiority fundamentally, irreversably undermined the democratic ideal. Not only was slavery and colonialism on the African continent justified but white, European hegemony in a world four-fifths colored was justified and made to seem inevitable.

EUROPEAN RESEARCH

    European research and scholarship on Africa has for the past four centuries dominated academia as well as popular information and the media world wide.  That research and "scholarship" has in the main served to explain away and justify Europe's rape of Africa, the European slave trade, the institution of slavery in the Americas and the exploitive colonial policies and practices of European powers in Africa.  Du Bois's long standing dream of an Encyclopedia Africana, directed and prepared primarily by African scholars, had as its stated intent to correct the omissions,  distortions and lies of European research and "scholarship" on Africa that for 400 years has provided the only image of Africa available to the world.  It was this dream that at age 91 brought Du Bois to Accra, Ghana, from the U.S., on the insistence of the late President Kwame Nkrumah, to head the Secretariat for an Encyclopedia Africana. The project was established on the basis of the creation of regional committees of African scholars around the continent as chief contributors to the Encyclopedia directed by the Secretariat in Accra.   

    Since the death of Du Bois in 1963, this effort has floundered suffering from periods of inaction by the Accra-based Secretariat as a result of a series of political upheavals in Ghana, corruption within the Secretariat, disinterest on the part of African governments and an almost total diversion by the current Secretariat from the original concept drawn up by Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah and the original leadership.  As a result to this day globally there has been little challenge to the Western "scholarship" on Africa, with the popular image being left largely in the hands of western television and the American and European media that circles the globe and is dependent upon that "scholarship".

FOUR AREAS

    There are four areas of great importance in scholarship on Africa that European scholars either ignored, severely distorted or deliberately lied about:  (1) the African reality prior to the slave trade and European colonial exploitation ;  i.e. black Africa’s antiquity and Africa’s interaction with the ancient and mediaeval worlds;  (2) the  devastating upheavals on the African continent caused by the European slave trade of four Centuries;  (3) the actual conditions of life and work imposed upon the slave by the European and American slave traders and slave holders, particularly in the deep south of the U.S.A. and in the Caribbean, and the Middle Passage horror; (4) the extent and nature of resistance to slavery by the slave.

    The importance of these four areas lies in their relationship to the image created of the character  of the African.  To this day that image suffers horribly as a result of the treatment by mainstream European and American researchers, scholars and writers on Africa in these four areas. That treatment has contributed to and validated the assertions that the African is inherently inferior to the European made by the ever more outspoken racist advocates of white supremacy in Europe and in North America today.

COMMITTED DEMOCRATS

    Surely committed democrats around the world must repeatedly ask themselves how it is that the  people, that is the electorate,  in the loudly trumpeted democracies of North America, Great Britain and Europe, stand by passively silent and thus approving as  their leaders tolerate, participate in and themselves initiate the most blatant violations of the human rights of the peoples of Central and South America and the Caribbean;  the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa; the peoples of southeast Asia; the peoples in the horn of Africa and throughout Black Africa, all overwhelmingly peoples of color. 

     The answer is found first in the belief, deliberately and skillfully propagated among Europeans and their progeny in the Americas, with growing intensity since the Vietnam war,  that peoples of color, and most assuredly Africans and peoples of African descent, are inherently, irretrievably inferior in intellect, in ability and in morality to Europeans and peoples of European descent.  And secondly, in an aggressively promoted, arrogant U.S. provincialism which, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the alleged threat of Communism, has been increasingly fed by an Anti-Islamic religious fervor.  Therefore, it is maintained,  Europeans and peoples of European descent have a duty, indeed,  a  Christian obligation to protect peoples of color, both from themselves and from the unscrupulous;  the belief that the best of all possible worlds of the future  is a world of unchallenged European hegemony.

NEWS AND INFORMATIION

    Examine the news and information Americans, and increasingly Europeans, are provided about the peoples of five-sixths of the world, the Third World.  When that five-sixths  is covered at all it is to report and pontificate on a catastrophe - -  man-made or natural; a conflict - - political, civil or regional; or the bizarre, the exotic, the "picturesque".  Keep mainstream America and Europe convinced that this TV/media image of black and colored peoples is the reality and several objectives  are achieved.  Most importantly, the alleged superiority of whites or Europeans is “ proven”; an elitist division within and between the communities of peoples of color is encouraged; the sting of the charge of white supremacy is greatly minimized, and, the responsibility for final resolution of "the problem" is placed on the victims.

     It is thus that white (European) superiority, the assertion that colored peoples are inherently inferior to white people, is being deliberately and skillfully used in the West to undermine  the ability and the desire of masses of Americans and Europeans to include peoples of color as fully entitled members of the human family and thus deserving of the same human dignity, the same social justice and the same human rights advocated for themselves.  It is thus that the peoples of North America,  and to a somewhat lesser extent the peoples of Europe, remain silent and unmoved by repeated violations of the human rights of five-sixths of humanity, endangering and undermining their ability to ultimately guarantee and defend their own human rights.

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

    With the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Du Bois asserted a special affinity he believed joined China and Africa;  in his words "a common heritage of wage slavery and contempt", the consequence of four centuries of European hegemony and imperial domination.   On February 23, 1959, the morning after his 91st birthday banquet hosted by the late Premier Chou En Lai in Beijing, in a speech to Peking University students that was broadcast by Radio China around the world, but was directed to Africa,  Du Bois declared:

  "China after long centuries has arisen to her feet and leapt forward.  Africa arise, and stand straight, speak and think! Act!  Turn from the West and your slavery and humiliation for the last 500 years and face the rising sun. . . . China is flesh of your flesh and blood of your blood.  China is colored and knows to what a colored skin in this modern world subjects its owner. . . China does not need American nor British missionaries to teach her religion and scare her with tales of hell.  China has been in hell too long, not to believe in a heaven of her own making.  This she is doing”

FUTURE WORLD

    In 1915, Dr. Du Bois declared: "Most men in this world are colored.  A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men.  "The future world will, in all reasonable probability be what colored men make it."

    To the peoples of Africa Dr. Du Bois counseled in his third and last autobiography, A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century,  published after his death:   "But, above all -- Africa, Mother of Men --  your nearest friends and neighbors are the colored peoples of China and India, the rest of Asia, the Middle East and the Sea isles, once close bound to the heart of Africa and now long severed by the greed of Europe.  Your bond is not mere color of skin, but the deeper experience of wage slavery and contempt."

    I appeal to researchers and scholars from around the world:  Undo the great injustice done Africa and Africans.  Expose the lies, the distortions and the omission of European “scholarship” on Africa.  Search out and provide the world with the truth about Africa and Africans, toward the realization of the Family of Man in our time.

DAVID G. DU BOIS